This article contains spoilers for “Doctor Who.”
“The Robot Revolution,” the latest “Doctor Who” season premiere, is a total mess. The bad guys are too silly, most of the jokes don’t land, and the social commentary involving Alan (Jonny Green) — the new companion Belinda Chandra’s (Varada Sethu) former incel boyfriend, who’s revealed to be the main villain — is clunky and played-out. I have no problem with “Doctor Who” making fun of toxic men like Alan, but a little more competence in the writing department would’ve gone a long way here.
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Perhaps the most disappointing part of “The Robot Revolution” is how Alan is defeated: Belinda presses her star certificate from the past up to her star certificate from the future; because it’s the same object touching itself, this creates a time explosion that destroys Alan yet leaves Belinda untouched. Why? Since the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) was holding Belinda, his time lord energy apparently protected her from the blast. I mean, sure, whatever works.
After the disappointing finale to season 14 (or season 1, depending on whether you still consider the current “Doctor Who” era its own separate show from the rest of the series’ 21st-century revival), a lot of fans were hoping showrunner Russell T. Davies would knock it off with these sort of hacky resolutions. No such luck, it seems.
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“The Robot Revolution” does give fans at least one cause for hope, however. Not only is Belinda fun to hang out with, but she’s also written a little differently from the typical “Doctor Who” companion. Sure, there are still some mysteries around her that need to be solved (not least of which is why she looks exactly like Mundy from the 2024 Steven Moffat-penned episode “Boom”), but her conversation in the TARDIS with the Doctor makes it clear that Belinda is more interesting than your average companion.
Unlike other Doctor Who companions, Belinda doesn’t need to find herself
The typical arc for companions, at least in 21st-century “Doctor Who,” is one of growing confidence. Going back to Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), most companions have started off thinking they’re nobody special, only to discover they’re tougher, smarter, and cooler than they thought. In the case of Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) specifically, her arc was about her realizing she didn’t need to put up with being the Doctor’s rebound. Similarly, Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) had to learn to not only let go of her childhood crush on and idolization of the Doctor, but to also accept she couldn’t build a life around waiting for him to keep coming back. The Doctor’s companions may not be kids, but their storylines generally hit the same narrative beats of the typical coming-of-age story.
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Meanwhile, Belinda feels like she’s already come of age. She knows who she is and has a healthy respect for herself. She’s impressed by the TARDIS (because who wouldn’t be?) but she doesn’t look at the Doctor with the wide-eyed wonder we’ve come to expect from new companions. Instead, she instantly clocks him in “The Robot Revolution” as a flaky liar, a dangerous person whom she shouldn’t spend too much time around. Belinda values his help throughout the episode because she knows it’s necessary, but she has no intention of taking things further than that.
Perhaps the most memorable moment in the premiere is when she points out how the Doctor scanned her DNA without even asking. We’ve grown so accustomed to the Doctor doing stuff like this that it’s jarring to see someone tell him no. It’s a moment that asks us to reflect back on past instances of the Doctor’s carelessness, like when he abandons Amy for 12 years (and then two more) in “The Eleventh Hour” or when he accidentally causes Rose to miss out on a year of her life in “Aliens of London.” Neither Rose nor Amy held these mistakes against the Doctor for that long, but Belinda would.
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It’s not just because Belinda’s got stronger boundaries; she’s also not running away from anything. Indeed, most companions start off in unhappy life situations, at which point the Doctor offers them a chance to escape. Belinda, on the other hand, already has a happy life at home and doesn’t want the Doctor to mess it up.
There’s no clear happy ending for Belinda on Doctor Who (which is promising)
Part of what makes Belinda’s first episode so interesting is that, well, she’s right. We’ve known the Doctor for decades at this point, but while we can trust him to save the day as best he can, we can’t trust him to be considerate. He’s indirectly gotten multiple companions killed, he’s always lying about something, and his time-traveling quasi-immortal lifestyle has left him with very little respect towards regular humans’ time. He can shrug off stealing a year of Rose’s life because a year is nothing to him. But a year is a significant fraction of Belinda’s life, and she’s not cool with him messing it up.
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This means that the best case scenario for this season is that the Doctor learns to be more honest and considerate. The more likely scenario, however, is that Belinda will lower her standards. Unfortunately, it’s easy to imagine an arc where she loses some of her assertiveness and self-respect, allowing herself to get swept up in the Doctor’s lifestyle and letting him walk all over her (as the Doctor unwittingly does in most of his relationships). It’s an intriguing potential framing of the Doctor/companion dynamic — one where the Doctor is a clear-cut bad influence, and we’re rooting for the companion to cut him out of her life.
The closest the show’s come to this sort of dynamic before is with Martha, who lets the Doctor treat her dismissively for an entire season before leaving on her own terms, only then seeming to earn his respect. The difference is that Martha’s decision was the culmination of a season’s worth of character development, whereas Belinda makes the same decision in her first episode. The only reason she’ll still be around next week is because the pesky TARDIS refuses to bring her back home.
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We’re used to the Doctor bringing out the best in his companions, but rarely do we get to see him bring out their worst. It’s not clear which direction “Doctor Who” will go with Belinda, but the fact that a downward slide already feels possible is pretty unique. (Jenna Coleman also had a fairly dark arc as Clara that saw her becoming too much like the Doctor and dying as a result, but that was fairly late in her run.) We’ve only had one episode with Belinda, but she’s already the most promising companion we’ve had in years.
New episodes of “Doctor Who” premiere Saturdays on Disney+.
